FORTRAN data base facility

To ensure that the data in a data base are put to the best use possible, it is reasonable to have widely-accepted programming languages enhanced with the capability of allowing use of the data. Because so many scientific and engineering programs are written in FORTRAN, and because so much research and development comes from these programs, a group of people interested in enhancing this language with data base capabilities met in 1974 under the auspices of the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) and formed a committee to look into such specifications for FORTRAN. This committee has been guided by two general sets of specifications, ANSI FORTRAN and the CODASYL data base reports.

Discussions yielded the specific syntax of commands that take the form of a command verb generally followed by a list of parameters enclosed in parentheses. The parameters are separated by commas, as is common in FORTRAN. A nested series of parameters without parentheses is used in some commands, in the traditional FORTRAN manner. Even though twenty new statements have thus been added to FORTRAN, this method was felt to be a better approach than simply describing a series of procedure calls.